| Verified against primary record | |
| What the state collects | A survey of medical services provided to patients resident abroad, run by the health ministry with the central bank; results may be published only in aggregate[1] |
|---|---|
| Published output, 2023 | Estimated revenue 42,899 million baht, against 34,088 million in 2022; balance-of-payments basis 26,996 million baht, marked provisional[2] |
| Patient numbers | Not published. The 2023 report gives growth rates only: patient numbers up 13 per cent and revenue up 26 per cent on 2022[2] |
| National policy | Cabinet approved the principles of a strategy to develop Thailand as an international health hub on 13 September 2016, covering 2017 to 2026[3] |
| Independently reported | |
| Accreditation | A statutory public organisation accredits hospitals; its data catalogue describes a database of 1,474 hospitals reporting accreditation status[4] |
| Bands apply only to the rows beneath them. The 2023 revenue estimate rests on 43 of 90 hospitals responding, so 47 were estimated rather than reported; the balance-of-payments figure is the one methodologically comparable with other countries. | |
Medical tourism in Thailand is among the oldest and most heavily marketed treatment-travel sectors in the world. It is also one where the state collects official data and deliberately does not publish a patient count, which is the single most important fact for anyone reading a Thai medical tourism figure.
What Thailand actually collects
The collection instrument is a survey of medical services provided to patients resident abroad, maintained by the health ministry’s department responsible for health service support. Its own description states that it is a database of medical services provided to foreign patients at Thai healthcare facilities, that its purposes include supporting Thailand’s goal of becoming a regional international medical hub, and that the central bank uses it to compile balance-of-payments statistics to international standards. It also states that the data is held confidential, for use only within that department and the central bank, and that results may be published only in aggregated form for academic use.[1]
That is the explanation for an absence that is usually treated as a mystery. No official Thai foreign-patient headcount is in the public domain because the collecting agency’s own policy prevents it, not because no collection exists.
The published figures, and what they measure
The office responsible for promoting the medical industry publishes a series of survey results on foreign-patient treatment revenue, produced in cooperation between the health ministry department and the central bank, with editions for the survey years 2021 through 2023.[5] The 2023 edition, dated 12 March 2025, reports that 43 of 90 hospitals surveyed responded, 48 per cent, including 15 of 20 large hospitals; that the responding hospitals reported 30,515 million baht of revenue, 13,904 million from outpatients and 16,611 million from inpatients; that estimated total revenue was 42,899 million baht against 34,088 million in 2022, labelled a 26 per cent increase; and that on a balance-of-payments basis the figure was 26,996 million baht against 23,641 million in 2022, marked provisional and subject to residency-basis verification. Inpatient care accounted for about 56 per cent of the estimated revenue and about 88 per cent on the balance-of-payments basis. Response rates across the series were 83 per cent in 2019, 49 in 2020, 32 in 2021, 38 in 2022 and 48 in 2023.[2]
Three cautions attach to those numbers. The headline total is a ministry estimate, because 47 of 90 hospitals did not report. The balance-of-payments figure, at roughly 63 per cent of the headline estimate, is the one methodologically comparable with other countries’ travel-services data, and it is the smaller of the two, which matters because figures resembling the larger one are the ones that circulate. And patient numbers appear in the report only as a growth rate, so no absolute count can be derived from it.
Other Thai statistical sources do not fill the gap. The national statistical office publishes no survey or series on foreign patients, health services for foreigners, or medical tourism among its listed collections.[6] The central bank’s published external-sector material was not found to contain a separate public health-travel line, although the survey above establishes that health-related travel is an item it compiles. Whether the bank publishes it as a distinct public series was not established.
Government policy
Thailand’s medical hub policy has a dated Cabinet foundation. The Cabinet approved the principles of a strategy to develop Thailand into an international health hub on 13 September 2016, aligned to the country’s eleventh and twelfth national economic and social development plans, with the strategy itself covering 2017 to 2026; a successor draft covering 2025 to 2034, carrying the English subtitle of a wellness and medical service hub, has since been published.[3] No official English title is published for the 2017 to 2026 strategy, so none is given here.
The institutional arrangement is that the health ministry’s department for health service support contains an office for comprehensive medical industry promotion, which maintains the policy documents and the statistics described above, and which also licenses private health service facilities and operates an approval procedure for advertising by health facilities.[7] Advertising control is therefore a licensing-side function with prior approval required, rather than a matter for a separate advertising regulator.
Accreditation and the counts that circulate
Hospital accreditation is run by a public organisation established under a royal decree of 2009 as amended in 2019, which sets healthcare standards, assesses organisational work systems and accredits healthcare organisations; its standard has received international certification, and it describes accreditation as an educational process.[4] Its data catalogue, updated 20 July 2025, describes a database comprising 1,474 hospitals nationwide, public and private, reporting accreditation status under its standards.[4]
That figure should be handled carefully. It is described as what the database comprises rather than as a count of currently accredited hospitals, the catalogue’s stated scope extends to public health centres as well as hospitals, and no breakdown by certification type is published there. Separately, the medical industry promotion office publishes a list of 48 privately owned hospitals certified to standards, by health district, with Bangkok accounting for 24; that page mentions no international accreditation body, and should not be read as a count of hospitals holding any particular international accreditation.[8]
Why the million-patient figures do not resolve
Claims that Thailand receives some number of millions of medical tourists a year do not trace to any Thai statistical series identified here. The national statistical office publishes none; the one instrument that would produce a number is confidential by the collecting agency’s own policy and publishes growth rates rather than counts; and the published revenue estimate rests on a 48 per cent response rate with the remainder estimated. The chain breaks at the first link, because there is no published national count to aggregate from.
There is also a counting-unit problem beneath the headline. Where private-hospital international patient figures exist at all, they are typically visit or encounter counts produced by a commercial operator, and include expatriates resident in Thailand and tourists treated incidentally alongside people who travelled for treatment. A visit count, a person count and a treatment-traveller count are three different quantities, and conflating them inflates the result.
One practical warning belongs in the record. A domain long used as the Thai medical hub’s public address, and still linked from the health ministry’s own homepage at the time of writing, has lapsed and now serves online gambling promotion. Any older citation pointing to it is a dead reference, and it should not be cited as a Thai government source.
See also
- Bumrungrad International Hospital, the single most cited Thai provider in this sector
- Medical Tourism and Balance of Payments Statistics, the framework the smaller Thai figure is compiled on
- Medical Tourism Revenue, on why revenue series and patient counts are not interchangeable
- International Patient Visits and Unique Patients, the counting-unit distinction behind inflated totals
References
- Department of Health Service Support, Ministry of Public Health, Thailand. Survey of medical services provided to patients resident abroad. No date stated on the page. Verified against primary record: the page was opened and its description of the database, its stated purposes, the central bank’s use of it and its confidentiality and aggregate-publication policy read. Retrieved 10 October 2026.
- Department of Health Service Support, Ministry of Public Health, Thailand, with the Bank of Thailand. Survey results on foreign patient treatment revenue, 2023. Dated 12 March 2025. Verified against primary record: the report was opened and the response rates, the reported and estimated revenue, the balance-of-payments figure and its provisional status, the inpatient shares and the stated growth rates read. Per-country shares in the document did not extract reliably and are not reported here. Retrieved 10 October 2026.
- Office for Comprehensive Medical Industry Promotion, Department of Health Service Support, Ministry of Public Health, Thailand. Background to the Medical Hub policy, together with the office’s strategy page. Verified against primary record: the pages were opened and the Cabinet resolution date, the alignment to the national development plans, the strategy years and the existence of a successor draft read. The strategy document itself has no machine-readable text layer, so its own title page was not verified, and no official English title is published. Retrieved 10 October 2026.
- Healthcare Accreditation Institute, Thailand. Data catalogue, with the institute’s English home page. Catalogue updated 20 July 2025. Verified against primary record: both pages were opened and the institute’s statutory basis and dates, its functions, the international certification of its standard, and the database figure and its stated scope read. The figure describes what the database comprises rather than a count of currently accredited hospitals. Retrieved 10 October 2026.
- Office for Comprehensive Medical Industry Promotion, Department of Health Service Support, Ministry of Public Health, Thailand. Thailand Medical Hub statistics. No publication date on the page. Verified against primary record: the page was opened and the series of survey editions and their dates read. Two listed editions link to the same file, so the later of those two is not cited as a separate edition here. Retrieved 10 October 2026.
- National Statistical Office of Thailand. National Statistical Office. Verified against primary record: the office’s listing of its current series and survey categories was opened and checked for any collection on foreign patients, health services for foreigners or medical tourism, and none appears. Retrieved 10 October 2026.
- Department of Health Service Support, Ministry of Public Health, Thailand. Department of Health Service Support. No date stated. Verified against primary record: the page was opened and the department’s regulatory role, its list of licensed private hospitals, its office for comprehensive medical industry promotion and its approval procedure for health-facility advertising read. Retrieved 10 October 2026.
- Office for Comprehensive Medical Industry Promotion, Department of Health Service Support, Ministry of Public Health, Thailand. Privately owned hospitals certified to standards. No last-updated date on the page. Verified against primary record: the page was opened and the total, the district distribution and the absence of any reference to an international accreditation body read. Retrieved 10 October 2026.
Sourcing note: Thai-language sources are the primary record for most of this entry and are cited at their own addresses. The Medical Council of Thailand’s establishing legislation could not be verified during this work and is therefore not described here, and the English short titles of the Thai health-facility legislation are not given because the government page that lists them uses two different renderings for the same statute. A domain formerly used for Thai medical hub promotion has lapsed and now serves unrelated commercial content; it is described in the text and deliberately not linked.